Tell 'Em About The Twinkie: What's In It?

What is it about the Twinkie that inspires such speculation about its ingredients…and its shelf life? We don’t know, but Newsweek has broken down what’s actually in a Twinkie. It’s gross, but then, if you’ve eaten one, you knew it would be. From Newsweek:

THE FILLING

• Shortening (in the form of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and/or beef fat) is the main ingredient.
• Polysorbate 60 is a gooey substance that helps replace cream and eggs at a fraction of the cost. It’s derived from corn, palm oil and petroleum.

• Cellulose gum gives the cr

me filling a smooth, slippery feel.

• Artificial vanillin is synthesized in petrochemical plants. The real thing comes from finicky tropical orchids that are pollinated by hand on the one day they bloom.

Good thing we haven’t actually eaten one of these things since the Nixon administration. Yes, we’re exaggerating. No, we were not alive.—MEGHANN MARCO

It’s an interesting article, but some of the ingredients that they mention in an attempt to scare the reader are a bit too mundane. Although us modern chefs now know that trans fat is very dangerous and very unnecessary in home cooking (I switched to Green Can Crisco a long time ago), we all used regular trans-fat shortening when it was in vogue and thought to be a zero-loss alternative to saturated fat.

My kid bought some Twinkies recently and I tried one. I was shocked — they are not even 10% as disgustingly good as when I was a kid. All I could conclude was that back in the day, they were even more hideously unhealthy than they are now — because, man, those things were good back then. Now: meh.

Your March 2 note about Newsweek breaking down what’s in a Twinkie was fun to see but frustrating for me….I actually wrote the book about Twinkie ingredients and Newsweek wrote the article about the book, Twinkie, Deconstructed (www.twinkiedeconstructed.com). Oh, well.

FYI, I got tired of reading without understanding what all that stuff on the ingredient list was, and decided to track all those things back down to where they come out of the ground. I’m a befuddled consumer, and like to get defuddled from time to time (usually resulting in a book—I’ve written seven).